Many information services are configured to send content to subscribers of the service via the Short Messaging Service (SMS), by e-mail and/or via the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). A particular problem is experienced in the transmission of MMS messages owing to the reliance on recipient terminals having a particular configuration and set of capabilities. For information services that are arranged to deliver messages to a large number of recipients, failed message delivery attempts can result in a wasteful use of network resources; this problem can become acute when attempting delivery to a large number of targeted recipients, and in view of the fact that conventional methods solve the failed delivery problem by (configurable) retransmission of the messages.
With such conventional methods the undelivered message is typically simply reintroduced into the message queue of the MMSC. This triggers delivery of the recycled message per any other message, either as soon as the queue is free or on the basis of a predetermined or dynamic time interval depending on the loading on the MMSC. A typical re-transmission setting is to try sending a given message a maximum of 5 times, within the constraints of time to live criteria specifying a period of e.g. 2 hours or 4 hours for the attempted re-transmissions. Assuming a scenario in which 5000 messages have been successfully delivered in the first attempt, 1000 have been successfully delivered in the second attempt, 1000 in the third attempt and 3000 did not receive the message, (even after trying 5 times as set as limit for example) it will be appreciated that successful delivery of 7000 messages involved 10000+5000+4000+3000+3000=25000 message delivery attempts and an associated success rate of 7/25. A typical example of such a conventional method is provided in international patent publication number WO2005/076572.
It will be appreciated that the aforementioned problem scales with the number of delivery attempts, since for the set of 3000 persons that are not in radio coverage or the terminals are off or the terminal settings are wrong, there is no number of delivery attempts that will result in successful delivery of the MMS message to these recipients.
As described in international publication number WO2003/056445 and French patent application number FR2868899, data communication network. design engineers can control the delivery of messages in a communication network by identifying a new recipient in the event that a single message fails to be delivered and re-transmitting the message content to the newly identified recipient.
A problem with the above proposed solution is that the system resources are expected to be continually dedicated to the task of re-transmitting message content as in each instance that a message fails to be delivered, a new recipient is selected and the message content is re-transmitted to the newly identified recipient. This ineffective use of system resources is also expected to result in a large back-log of message throughput, in particular when a large number of messages require re-transmission.